Trade This (Season 10, Episode 16)
Premise: The shooting of a junior broker uncovers a rigged internet stock, a staged harassment settlement and a mob family’s missing millions, and McCoy builds a death-penalty case with gangsters as his victims.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 10, Episode 16
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Michael Gross as Carl Braddock, Danny Mastrogiorgio as Bruce Valentine, Vincent Curatola as Joey Dantoni Sr., Frankie Dellarosa as Joseph “Joey” Dantoni Jr., Samuel E. Wright as defense attorney Morris Stokely
- Director
- Jace Alexander
- Writers
- Story: René Balcer; Story & teleplay: Barry Schindel
Summary
The Investigation
“Trade This” opens with a stockbroker murder: a gunman walks into the brokerage Braddock and Todd, wounds the receptionist and kills 24-year-old Sean Alvarez, a broker who was due to quit within a month. A colleague tells Briscoe and Green that Alvarez had been chasing IPO work under his supervisor, Bruce Valentine, and that Valentine was hyping and then unloading a dot-com called Healthroad2000, whose shares soared before collapsing to pennies.
Phone records lead to a photo studio where Alvarez paid $1,700 for old negatives. His mother explains that he had posed for a calendar in college and that one picture surfaced on a gay website and was emailed to him at work. He then sued the firm for sexual harassment, and it settled at once. Alvarez’s email contacts point to Mitchel Sims, a gambler and old schoolmate of Valentine who lost heavily on Healthroad2000 while trading on margin. Sims turns up dead in his car at a Kennedy Airport lot with a .38 in his lap; gunshot residue and the receptionist tie him to the shooting.
The firm had quietly paid off Sims’s defaulted second mortgage, an insurer reveals that the harassment claim was settled for $2 million with no discovery, and a technician finds the offending email was backdated with an administrator’s code. Faced with a string of identical pump-and-dump offerings, Carl Braddock says the companies belonged to the mob. Valentine then claims that Joseph Dantoni, Jr. ordered Alvarez killed through Sims, and the younger Dantoni is arrested.
The Trial
Joey Dantoni Sr. comes to McCoy as a self-described crime victim: he says Valentine controlled the shell companies, drained more than $4 million of his money along with the accounts of eight associates, and borrowed a .38 from Joey Jr. Ballistics links that gun to an old gangland killing. Schiff resents doing the mob’s work, but McCoy charges Valentine with first-degree murder.
Defense attorney Morris Stokely attacks Braddock’s credibility and parades the criminal records of the Dantoni witnesses, and the elder Dantoni hints at his authority before taking the Fifth, then dodges questions about where his money came from. Carmichael notices that $15 million passed through the scheme while only $13 million in mob losses is accounted for. On cross-examination McCoy argues that Valentine pocketed the $2 million settlement instead of paying Alvarez, used the desperate Sims to kill him, and then shot Sims at the airport with the Dantoni gun.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Valentine of first-degree murder, and in the penalty phase it sentences him to death after deliberating for less than an hour. A closing remark about phoning “the family” plays on the word’s double meaning.
Why it stands out
- McCoy’s key witnesses are a reputed crime boss and his associates, whom the DA’s office treats as fraud victims despite their own records.
- The case ends in a death sentence, returned by a jury that deliberates for less than an hour.
- Vincent Curatola guest stars as mob patriarch Joey Dantoni Sr.